'Go ahead,' says the grey-haired guide in a southern drawl so languorous it makes Deputy Dawg sound clipped. 'Ask hur anythung y'all waarnt...' I go blank, but fortunately my wife is less star-struck. 'Dolly,' she says, 'were you involved in the women's liberation movement?' 'Course I was,' comes the laughing reply. 'I remember when I burnt my bra - it took the firefighters three days to put out the blaze!'

We are talking to Dolly Parton - not the real Dolly, you understand, but a computerised version of her that cleverly responds to all manner of questions with the appropriate pre-recorded soundbite. Actually, everyone we meet tells us that the tape is just like the real Dolly and that if we are lucky enough to meet her, she'll be just like our new best friend.

'She's just so natural,' says Jackie, who's showing us around. With Dolly's trademark white blonde wigs, painted face and astonishing 40in bust ('all bought and paid for'), 'natural' is not the first adjective you'd use to describe one of country music's most enduring and phenomenally popular stars.

We are talking to 'Dolly' in the bowels of her Chasing Rainbows exhibition, just one of seven theatres in Dolly's very own theme park, the brilliantly named Dollywood. It's not a private park, like Michael Jackson's Neverland; anyone can go - in fact more than three million thrill-seekers and music fans visit the 140-acre estate every year, many of them bringing their pets, who shack up at the nearby Doggywood kennels.

What Dollywood is, though, is a monument to the diminutive singer's colourful life and her passion for all things connected with the nearby Great Smoky Mountains. And, like so many things in America, from drive-thru cashpoints to drop-in wedding chapels, the park confounds all your expectations.

Gay men, embittered divorcees and hopeless romantics who are familiar with the Parton oeuvre, and fans of her outlandish, rhinestone-studded wardrobe, will probably think it would be illegal for a straight man and his family to visit Dollywood - unless we were kitted out in matching pink stetsons and knew the words to 'Jolene' by heart, but in fact (and this is truly something I never thought I'd write) her theme park isn't kitsch. In fact, it's rather tasteful. I realise that, to the legions of human magpies out there, this is sad news. But for anyone interested in genuine mountain music, authentic country cooking and the scariest wooden rollercoaster in America, it's a godsend.

The park opened in 1961 as a small tourist attraction called Rebel Railroad. In 1986, against the express wishes of her business advisers, Dolly - who says she likes to 'do business like a man' - bought into the park, renamed it Dollywood, and jokingly admitted that she just needed somewhere where her extended family could be employed.

Vita Love with Dynamite Pete
Nestling in the foothills of the Smokies, it's one of the most unusual and attractive theme parks I've ever been to. Yes, it boasts extreme rides - the Mystery Mine drops you 85ft down a disused shaft, while Thunderhead features 22 accelerated turns, 32 crossovers and plenty of 'hang time' - where your body defies gravity and your brain and stomach swap places. (Does Dolly herself ever ride, I asked an assistant? 'Er, no,' came the hesitant reply, 'due to certain, um, physical problems...')

But in Dollywood you can also watch a fiddle being handcrafted, order an authentic wooden horse carriage, taste apple marmalade as it was made in the 1800s, sit in a one-room schoolhouse or go to church. Then there are the 40 shops, the dozens of restaurants, the full-size steam engine... It's not your run-of-the-mill scare-you-and-fleece-you theme park.

But what's really remarkable about Dollywood is the music. At a dozen theatres and locations across the park, there is a continuous programme of live music. From gospel to bluegrass and doo-wop to rock'n'roll, the place twangs with guitars and gravel-voiced singers.

During the month before we visited, the National Gospel celebration was taking place, which featured more than 250 free concerts. We pick and choose our way from the glitzy Great American Country Show to the Smoky Mountain String Band and the Dreamland Drive-In. Our favourite is 'out on the back porch' with the Kinfolks, Dolly's own uncle and aunt. We cheer as the wizened but dapper Lewis Owens, who gave Dolly her first 'geetar', plays classics by Merle Haggard, George Jones, Willie Nelson and Elvis. 'Wasn't he the King of the Beatles?' whispers my six-year-old daughter.

But for true Dolly fans, the only place to be is that Chasing Rainbows exhibition. Here you can try on the superstar's wigs, sing a duet with her on a TV screen and gawp at her cantilevered dresses. You can also hear about Dolly's extraordinary journey from rags to rhinestones.

She was born to dirt-poor farmers, the fourth child of 12, and brought up in a dilapidated two-room cabin on Locust Ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains, just a few miles from the park. Dolly still owns the shack and returns to it even now for inspiration. It has no electricity and no running water - 'unless you are prepared to run get some'.

You can gain your own inspiration from the exact replica she's had built in Dollywood, complete with newspaper-covered walls, quilts made of off-cuts and the family-of-14's only bed. It was from Locust Ridge that the singer, aged just 18 and carrying 'nothing but her music and hairspray', chased her first rainbow to Nashville.

Nashville is a three-hour drive from Dollywood, so we didn't make it quite that far in our week in Tennessee. We did, however, manage to stumble out of the park gates and into the local town of Pigeon Forge. Anyone who has spent any time in a theme park knows that leaving is usually the best part of the day. But at Pigeon Forge, we found the stomach-churning ride was just beginning. While Dollywood presents a bucolic image of what America was like a century ago, Pigeon Forge presents a modern vision of the country that would give Hieronymus Bosch nightmares.

The name Pigeon Forge comes from an iron forge built by Isaac Love (no relation) sometime around 1820 on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in an area that for centuries had been used by the Cherokee as a hunting ground.

Today, the town unfurls itself for six gaudy miles on either side of a six-lane road known, without apparent irony, as the Parkway. Along the Parkway there are at least a dozen crazy golf courses (we had plans to play a Pigeon Forge championship, but were defeated by the sheer number of courses). There are also at least a dozen multi-level go-kart tracks, plus ranks of malls, motels, pancake houses, donut drive-thrus and a 'Fudge, Knives, Swimwear & Leather' shop - just what every town needs.

But even by Pigeon Forge's demanding standards, the winner of our 'Strangest Night of the Week' goes to the Dixie Stampede. Even if you were the adopted offspring of Louis Theroux and Borat, nothing would prepare you for the downright hooting'n'hollering weirdness of the stampede. It takes place in a vast barn right off the Parkway, and is what might be called, in another universe, a 'dinner and show'.

About 1,500 people sit at long bench tables around an oval horsering. The show gets under way when 10 bison trot snorting into the ring, through clouds of smoke, to a thumping soundtrack. These are then chased off by yipping and yeehaa-ing women on horses, who do dangerous things while dressed in leather and spangly chaps.

We then marvel as men dressed as Civil War soldiers perform headstands, dismounts, somersaults and swordfights - all at a gallop. Later, we pick our jaws off the floor as pigs race round the arena followed by running ostriches ridden by tight-trousered women, and finally a 40ft screen appears showing Dolly singing her patriotic anthem 'Colour Me America' ('I see red when evil speaks/Spilling red blood on our streets...'). The good folk to our right all stand, their fists held to their hearts.

While this has been happening, all 1,500 of us have been served dinner: corn, soup, potato and a chicken. That's right a whole chicken - each. Oh, and there's no cutlery. Or alcohol. But that's only because you can't really buy booze in Pigeon Forge; the town was completely dry until just three years ago. One night, my wife and I brave the taunts of our children ('you're alcoholics, you drink all the time') and drive 12 miles though the rain to buy a bottle of red in Gatlinburg, the next town.

Just as you can leave a theme park, so you can leave Pigeon Forge, though 'escape' would be a better word. After four days of man-made thrills, we want to see what Mother Nature could offer. So we hire a car and, with the children looking longingly back at the bright lights and pancake parlours of their 'favourite ever town', we drive 10 miles to spend a few days in another park - the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The park straddles the ridgeline of the Smokies, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are the tail end of Appalachians. It was created in 1936, when the few European farmers who had put down roots were bought out. But their loss is our gain: the park encompasses 814 square miles of totally unspoilt deciduous forest.

The Cherokee described these mountains as shaconage, which means 'blue, like smoke' and refers to the drifts of cloud that seem to linger in the vast creases of the steep-sided valleys. We hike to the 100ft-high Alum Cave Bluffs, a source of saltpetre for Civil War gunpowder, and gaze, humbled, across miles and miles of soaring, tree-lined ridges.

We keep an eye out for bears - the park has a thriving population of them. We heed signs that warn a 'fed bear is a dead bear' and take our picnic leavings home. We practise looking intimidating too - this is effective against an aggressive bear apparently, and a useful life skill for the school playground, I figure. Needless to say we don't see any bears, though when we take a horseback ride we do see wild geese and numerous deer.

The following day, we head for Cades Cove, a stunningly picturesque valley first settled by Englishmen in the 1820s. It has been left exactly as it was when the park was formed in the 1930s. We peer into John Oliver's house, a one-room log cabin, just like the one we are staying in - except that ours has a 48in plasma telly, a six-person hot tub, underfloor heating and a full-size pool table, of course.

We also sit for a moment in the area's Primitive Baptist church. While we pause, several groups of visiting Baptists get talking and decide on an impromptu hymn. The men sing out, the women weave their harmonies into every heartfelt line and the rough planks of the simple wooden room echo with their voices, just as they probably did each Sunday for John Oliver all those lifetimes ago.

On our final day, we head back to Dollywood. The park is beginning to gear up for Christmas, and more than 3.5 million fairy lights are being readied. Rehearsals are also under way for this year's production of Dollywood's Babes in Toyland. Ah, a touch of kitsch at last...

Essentials

Martin Love and family stayed in a luxury log cabin in Pigeon Forge, from £75 a night with Just Tennessee (just-tennessee.com). Observer readers can book eight nights for the price of seven until the end of 2008 by calling 08707 557799. For information on Dollywood, see dollywood.com. Delta airlines (delta.com) flies daily from Gatwick to Knoxville via Atlanta or Cincinnati. For fly-drive holidays contact America As You Like It (020 8742 8299; americaasyoulikeit.com). More information from Tennessee Tourism (01462 440784; deep-south-usa.com/tennessee.html).

Variations on a theme: more alternative parks

Dickens World, Chatham, Kent

Step back in time and stroll through Victorian London streets at this themed attraction celebrating the life and work of Charles Dickens. Take a boat ride based on the escape of Magwitch, the reformed convict in Great Expectations, through dingy wharves and clapboard houses. Walk through the damp corridors of Marshalsea Prison, where Dickens' own father ended up. Toddlers can head to Fagin's Den - which is a soft play area, rather than a school for thieves.

Watch a re-enactment of Jesus being forced to carry his cross by snarling Roman soldiers at this biblical theme park. Explore the city of Jerusalem in miniature and visit a replica of the garden tomb where Jesus was buried. Daily biblical and historical presentations by archaeologists as well as musical productions are also on offer.

This magical open-air museum depicting rural life a century ago features 100 original historic buildings from around the country, some dating back to the 16th century. These have been taken apart and painstakingly rebuilt at Ballenberg, which is surrounded by dramatic mountain scenery. There are demonstrations of typical crafts, including cheese-making, clockmaking and woodcarving, as well as 250 native farmyard animals.

You won't find rides or rollercoasters at this theatrical theme park in 30 acres of French countryside. Some 1,000 locals take part in beautiful choreographed scenes of rural life dating from medieval times. All shows are based on historical tales, and pre-bookable translation headphones are available.

· 00 33 251 641111; puydufou.com Tickets for adults and children from €15

Grutas Park, Lithuania

Big on history but small on 'amusement', this 20-acre park south of Vilnius recreates life under Stalin. Relics of Lithuania's communist past include statues of Lenin, Stalin and other leaders, barbed-wire fences and guard towers and a gulag, or forced labour camp, similar to the one to which 360,000 Lithuanians were sent. There's also a merry-go-round and a small zoo.